Developer productivity tools and Visual Studio extensions

May 20, 2012

A few days ago a question was asked on Readify’s internal forum about useful VS extensions. A few extensions were mentioned that I had not used before and I am glad to have installed them now. So I thought I’d share my current toolbox with you.

This is not meant to be anywhere as exhaustive as Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Tools. I honestly just do not use that many applications! This is a list of tools and applications I find very useful and/or use very frequently.

Visual Studio extensions and tools

HideMenu: “Automatically hides the Visual Studio main menu when not in use, similar to Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer.”: mentioned by Dmitry Kryuchkov.

NCrunch: “NCrunch is an automated parallel continuous testing tool for Visual Studio .NET. It intelligently takes responsibility for running automated tests so that you don’t have to, and it gives you a huge amount of useful information about your tests (such as code coverage and performance metrics) inline in your IDE while you work.”

NestIn: “Nest any type of file on any other type of file within your solution explorer!”: mentioned by Jake Ginnivan.

NuGet Package Manager: “A collection of tools to automate the process of downloading, installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing packages from a VS Project.”

SlowCheetah: “This package enables you to transform your app.config or any other XML file based on the build configuration. It also adds additional tooling to help you create XML transforms.”. CodeAssassin.ConfigTransform, while not an application or a VS extension, is an alternative option. You may find a comparison here.

TestDriven.Net: “makes it easy to run unit tests with a single click, anywhere in your Visual Studio solutions.”

RestoreReloadPackage: “This package will reload the files you had open when your project reloads.”: mentioned by Jake Ginnivan. Scott says it works on his machine and I know quite a few of my colleagues are using this; but after installing this package my VS felt much slower and crashed a few times!! Perhaps it has some collision with my other extensions. Otherwise this is a much needed extension.

Team Foundation Sidekicks: “a suite of tools for Microsoft Team Foundation Server administrators and advanced users providing Graphic User Interface for administrative and advanced version control tasks in multi-user TFS environments.”

TFS Power Tools: “a set of enhancements, tools and command-line utilities that increase productivity of Team Foundation Server scenarios.”

Chrome Developer Tools: “The Developer Tools, bundled and available in Chrome, allows web developers and programmers deep access into the internals of the browser and their web application.”. I used to use FireBug; but now I barely ever use it and FireFox for web programming and I must admit I cannot do it without Chrome and Chrome Dev Tools. If you want some kick-arse Chrome Dev Tools download Chrome Canary. I cannot stop talking about Chrome! When in dev tools (which you can bring up by pressing ctrl-shift-i) press ? to see a list of keyboard shortcuts. The shortcuts are awesome. For example, I felt really silly for having spent so much time on the Scripts pane looking for a script file after I learnt ctrl-o (resharper like) file lookup!

… and a few source control power tools:

git-tfs: “git-tfs is a two-way bridge between TFS and git, similar to git-svn.”. If you like me have to use TFS then do yourself a favor and use git-tfs to almost completely avoid TFS. git-tfs combined with Posh-Git have saved me so many f words a day ;-)

git extensions: “the only graphical user interface for Git that allows you control Git without using the commandline.”

TortoiseGit: “supports you by regular tasks, such as committing, showing logs, diffing two versions, creating branches and tags, creating patches and so on”

Posh-Hg: “Inspired by the Posh-Git project. Posh-hg provides a custom prompt and tab expansion when using Mercurial from within a Windows Powershell command line.”

TortoiseHG: “a Windows shell extension and a series of applications for the Mercurial distributed revision control system.”. The rather new HG Workbench is great.

DiffMerge: “an application to visually compare and merge files within Windows, Mac OS X and Linux”. I use this for my file and folder comparison from windows explorer.

P4Merge: “allows users to visualize the differences between file versions. P4Merge uses color coding to simplify the process of resolving conflicts that result from parallel or concurrent development.”. I use this as my code diff and merge tool. You may find an article about integrating P4Merge with VS here.

… and some really handy applications and not necessarily programming related:

EverNote: “a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving.”

SublimeText: “Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose. You’ll love the slick user interface and extraordinary features.”. This is great for editing Javascript and CSS.